Human Nipple Counter At Time Of Writing = 12.928115686 Billion Nipples~! With 18 Billion Nipples predicted by 2050, what does the hacking community have to offer to help slow our rapidly swelling nippledom?
DIY Hardware
It seems the nerds did get revenge after all – hacking and other mundane modifications of information technology have somehow had a sheen of glamour attached to them in recent years. Beyond wandering the networks, hacking into telephone systems for free calls, and copying your grandmother’s credit card numbers, todays hacking community often targets hardware – prizing open all manner of consumer devices for modifying, tweaking and reassembling.
The circuit bending folk take apart old electronic toys to make musical instruments out of them. Linux-heads labour intensively over ways to install the linux operating system on ipods, xboxes or just about any vaguely electronic appliance. Photographers figure out how to attach cameras to kites and take pictures remotely. Case-Modders go to ridiculous ends to house computers inside spaceship replicas, alien-heads, toasters, old ataris or one of my personal favourite mods – submerging a running computer motherboard inside a fish-tank full of oil (see oilcomputer.com – oil doesn’t conduct electricity apparently ). Many of these hardware hackers flock around sites like hackaday.com or makezine.com ( & stacks others ), but in the end, no matter how complex their machines are, they are still playing with relatively simple levels of complexity compared to the ‘wetware’ we might call our flesh.
Body Modification
Aye, the catch-all phrase for tattoists, piercers, surreal plastic surgeon artists, weightlifters, gender benders and so on, has been turned into a squeamish surgery splattering documentary film of the same name. Wandering past http://bmeworld.com or bodymod.org will probably give a good idea of what to expect. Curious kittens might also like to wander past one star of the film at thelizardman.com to check out his various sculptural under-skin add-ons, his forked tongue and full head tattoo etc. The film is careful to point out that each of us pursues body modification somewhere along a sliding scale, that might start with cutting our hair or fingernails, shaving, dying our hair etc – and slides up the other end to someone like ‘Stalking Cat’ with his pointed ears, shaped eyelids, ‘tiger teeth’, tattoed face, modified lips and added whiskers~! One interesting guy embedded magnets under his skin, and was planning to develop it further as a kind of ‘extra sense’ for blind people to use in their magnet-lined apartments. And what’s a body-mod film without bucketloads of genital modification? It was of course covered in plenty of close-up surgical detail, and while some of the permutations were genuinely ‘novel’ ( penises split down the shaft and joined by pierced rings, anyone? ) none of the mods seemed to particularly focus on slowing down population growth.
Counting Nipples
“In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate, with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder.”
Prof Stephen Hawking – The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)
Of course, we’re all going to die slow horrible deaths long before 2600 as civilisation as we know it crumbles around us over the course of the 21st century. Or maybe as the United Nations estimate would put it – our population growth is expected to level out around 2050 at 9 billion or so people. Undoubtedly we “could” do a good job of ‘housing’ and feeding 18 human nipples by then, but this presumes we vastly improve the unsustainable way we are living with only 13 billion nipples now. Pause for a moment – and add half of the population of the entire world onto it again. Aside from the sheer skyrocketing numbers, population holds a fe wother challenges. Aging populations are a worry for many nations, as the average age increases and pensioners keep kicking for longer – with less young people to support them. Environmental refugees are likely to increase as access to water especially becomes increasingly important over this century. And the issues go on and on. What to Do?
Kill Ourselves?
This is the option offered by the Church of Euthanasia, an organization that advocates radical action to control the global population – it’s four pillars being suicide, sodomy, cannibalism & abortion. Nice. ( www.churchofeuthanasia.org )
Animal Condoms?
“Working on elephant populations in Zambia, I was visited by Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund,” says Professor Short. “He said, ‘You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF’s money on buying condoms.’ He was right, and human overpopulation is ultimately the greatest threat to wildlife.”
Prof. Roger Short & Sir Peter Scott, founder of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
Lobby?
The charismatically titled ‘Sustainable Population Australia’ , has amongst other campaign points, called to have a Minister for Population in Federal Cabinet, rather than a Minister for Immigration, recognising that immigration is but a sub-set of the broader issue of population. Their site is full of startle and provocation, shock & awe. We breed so much~! ( www.population.org.au )
Watch David Attenborough Videos?
“Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment,”
– Sir David Attenborough, in The Life of Mammals ( probably cliffside dangling in a safari suit, carefully brushing his hair out of his eyes).
jean poole